I think most everything built stock will return the virtual name. @@ServerName, ServerProperty(), etc will all return the virtual name. I think you may have to resort to...

I specify specific databases, and its possible that one does not exist anymore as we tooks some old applications offline. I will double check all the databases selected and...

Curious what the reason is for wanting to limit the words in the index? Do you think you will get faster index results (not sure you will), trying to...

I am not aware of any direct way to read log files with Reporting Services. RS uses data sources to access the data, so unless you can setup a...

If its always present and the same size use the right() function with the size of that RIGHT(column-name, 7) in your examples.

If its not the same size then use charindex()...

Depends on the definition of "not used." If you mean empty columns then you could look at using some queires based on the system tables like sys.columns. You...

The transaction rolled forward/back should not be any issue. That is simply the dbcc command getting the database to stable state to perform its actions (or so is my...

And Lynn comes out of the shadows to win the debate! Ouch. 😛

No problem Jeff... I like a good debate! Its what makes the job fun and makes you rethink your basis of how you handle solutions to issues in the...

That is true. But it can work the other way as well. ISNULL keeps the original data type. So if it is 2 characters and you isnull(column(char(2),...

Haha... I agree that truely portable code is almost impossible to achieve. 🙂 But working in an environment with multiple systems we try to make our code as...

True... it is slightly (very slightly) faster. And in billions of rows it could make a difference. But is it wroth compliance of standards and advantages of functionality...

Can you do something as follows (Verify before you run this code in prod :))

...

Just as a note as well.. if you are going to end up processing millions upon millions rows as indicated make sure you look at working with subsets to keep...

The thing to really thinik about is not logical disk, but physical disk. If you have one physical hard drive and create two logical drives you will not really...